[VIDEO] The Event Planner Role is Changing: Here's What Skills You Need Today

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Today we're going to leave our calculators behind and talk about why we got into events in the first place. 

Partners are incredible -- they help you bring in new audiences, they can often decrease line items, and they can often make your event look super legit. So, how do you get great partners?

The way to think about it is to identify it into stages. You find the right partner, you wanna pitch that partner, and then you really wanna lock it in, and execute, and get the most value out of that partnership.

We're gonna walk through each three of those things right now.

Let's walk through a real life scenario. We're throwing a 100-person event. So, in order to fill the room with 100 people, I like to send out about 10 times the number of invitations, so that's inviting around 1,000 people.

Then, I like to try and get about 4 times the ratio of RSVPs to the capacity of the room. That comes to 400 people. In an event, you typically see what's called a flow, in and out of the venue throughout the event. You're really gonna try to get about 150 people or more to actually attend the event, so we're gonna look for about a 1.5x attendance rate.

The goal that we're gonna talk about today, is how to improve the percentage between RSVPs and attendees.

Even if you’re looking for a snapshot of an adorable dog, you definitely won’t be disappointed.

Actually, I immediately Googled it, and, lo and behold, there were all sorts of job descriptions online for Head of Event Ops, Head of Event Technology and Operations, Event Technology Manager. Really cool job descriptions.

We're going to talk about that in a sec. But, first, let's talk about what this shift means. And, so, I've started to call this shift, the shift from EP, event planner, to VP, the VP, vice-president mentality.

You know, when we're talking about EPs, we're typically talking about people who are responsible for the project management, right? And so, typically, they're going…they're focused on the event: Hiring vendors, finding linens, getting the DJ. That was the old school. But, nowadays, they're still responsible for that stuff, but they're also responsible for the performance of the event. And, so, I talk about that, going from project manager to marketer. It also means that we're going from buying stuff, procuring stuff, to actually proving the value of that stuff, so, from procurement to proving.

Now, an event planner, an EP, is highly focused on the attendees in the room, right? Who's gonna be in the room? Is that gonna make a great event? And that still matters That's still something that we need to focus on.

But now, we also need to focus on, not just the attendee value, but the entire lifetime value of our customers and actually focus on the full sequence of what that person does and how it relates to actual money. And last but not least, even the way that our bosses are speaking to us has changed. We're actually seeing, you know, the old school of "high-five, great event, well done, I've had a blast" change. Now what we hear after events is, "Show me the data." Right? "Show me the numbers. What are the outcomes? How did this whole thing work?"

Actually, I immediately Googled it, and, lo and behold, there were all sorts of job descriptions online for Head of Event Ops, Head of Event Technology and Operations, Event Technology Manager. Really cool job descriptions. We're going to talk about that in a sec.

But, first, let's talk about what this shift means. And, so, I've started to call this shift, the shift from EP, event planner, to VP, the VP, vice-president mentality.

You know, when we're talking about EPs, we're typically talking about people who are responsible for the project management, right? And so, typically, they're going…they're focused on the event: Hiring vendors, finding linens, getting the DJ. That was the old school. But, nowadays, they're still responsible for that stuff, but they're also responsible for the performance of the event. And, so, I talk about that, going from project manager to marketer. It also means that we're going from buying stuff, procuring stuff, to actually proving the value of that stuff, so, from procurement to proving.  

‌• Before the event: we use these lists to promote the event, and fill the room with the right people.

 ‌• During the event: we use these lists to prioritize our time, to know how to engage with people, when to engage with them, and how much energy and effort we should spend with that person.

‌• After the event: we use these lists to hone and craft personalized messages to re-engage and drive value from these attendees.

To better understand this, what we did was we analyzed all of the lists, all of the classifications and buckets that event marketers are using across the slash system, and we started to look for commonalities and try to understand how people are organizing their lists.

We did find that many people are using about 9 different types of lists. So I wanna share that with you and walk through the nine types of lists that we most commonly see. Let's rattle them off together.

So, this is a big deal for a lot of reasons. It means that events are no longer being seen as the stepchild of marketing, but instead, are being placed at the center of the marketing stack. People are understanding how effective, how efficient events are. They're also understanding that the people who host these events need to be rock stars. They need to be able to go cross-department, they need to be able to be mathematicians, and have huge EQs that will command the attention of our most important clients.

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I've developed a three-step process to use reciprocity to drive the RSVP to attendance ratio. The three steps are: (1) get that attendee to invest, (2) confirm that they've made a good decision, and (3) lock it in.

Note: If you're interested and you're gonna be pitching for partnerships soon, I included some of my best templates as a downloadable in the article with this video. So feel free to go download that and use my one-sheet template. But this is the general outline of what I think makes the best one-sheets. The point of a one-sheet is to communicate visually how legit and real your event is.

Are you hiring, feel free to copy some of their

So in some of the following episodes, we're going to talk about not just why surprises are so powerful, we're going to talk about how we can set, meet, and then beat expectations with every single action that we do.

We're going to talk about how we're going to use surprise before, during, and after the event. I believe that after a couple more conversations about this, you're going to buy-in like I have to the power of surprise and you're going to recommit like I have to "surprise."

We know when to send it now, but now let's talk about where you're actually promoting to. You know, it really is important to take advantage of Google Analytics and look in your analytics tab and understand where your traffic is coming from.

What we have found is that, finally, mobile traffic, when it comes to ticket purchases, has crossed over 50%. Now it's 56% of your attendees purchasing on mobile. What that says to me is: you better be optimizing your mobile experience. Make sure it's seamless, make sure it's easy to buy.

Last but not least, we found across all of these events that we're analyzing, there was one common denominator for the events that actually sold out. The events that put the attendees on the page and put the speaker pictures on the page, really promoting via social clout, had a nearly two-times higher likelihood of selling out their events than those that did not show the attendees or the speakers that were at the event.

Social clout is a really powerful mechanism, and I would urge you to take advantage of it. You need a market through your attendees and market through your vendors, market through your speakers, market through your sponsors. It's really the best way to sell out your event.

I hope you find that useful. We've got some genius data scientists in the back running regression analyses.

 (1) Percentage of attendees-to-opportunities: Assume it is going to increase if you comp tickets. What I mean to say is, do you think you can fill the room with a better attendee list that are more likely to turn into actual revenue? If you think so, make an assumption. In this last formula, the scenario you saw, we assumed that it would jump from 10% to 25%. I'll leave it to you to determine what percentage you think you can drive it to, if you had higher quality attendees. 

(2) What is your ACV? In our scenario, we talked about a 25K ACV, that's great. That's a nice ACV. Candidly, if you've got that average contract value, you have to comp tickets. It’s a no brainer. If you've got $100,000 as an average contract value, it is really a no brainer. But what we have found is that, if your average contract value is about $15,000, it might not make sense. You really wanna be above $15,000 for comp tickets to make sense for you.

(3) What is your Sales Cycle? Ask yourself, are you willing to wait for a good amount of time to actually see that revenue recognized? We've been looking at our data, and especially for some of these larger user conferences, you can see a sale cycle be about a year. That means that, from the time that person became an opportunity to the day that that dollar is deposited in your bank account, it could be a full year, if not more. So you just have to ask yourself, are you willing to wait that long, as opposed to getting the little dollars in now, with the ticket revenue? Can you wait for a much larger contract in a year or more?

Last but not least, people get people. If you can show that people are attending your event, and they're telling other people, you can display that. That's the type of stuff that actually drives attendance.

So, you're gonna want to show and get RSVPs early and often as you can. Then get those people to commit and tell their friends about it. We found that that is the number one way to drive RSVPs.

You want to use reciprocity to drive attendance, and a way to do so is to get the attendee to invest. You wanna confirm that they made a good decision with that three-step process, and, last but not least, you want to lock it in with a specific, personal confirmation that they are gonna meet someone on site.

Best of luck with your events.

You want to use reciprocity to drive attendance, and a way to do so is to get the attendee to invest. You wanna confirm that they made a good decision with that three-step process, and, last but not least, you want to lock it in with a specific, personal confirmation that they are gonna meet someone on site.

Best of luck with your events.

Urgency is one of the most powerful techniques that I've seen in terms of driving ticket sales. You can use urgency in things like "Early bird sales end soon," or you can say something like, "We're almost full," or "This is going to be a really important event for you to attend." Drive that point home with frequency and urgency, and make sure, in all your communications, to go through that checklist, G-I-V-E.

After you've outlined every single step in the process, your next step is to figure out who the major players are. This might be someone who's actually at your organization, or an agency, or even a freelancer. You're trying to figure out who's involved. I find that a really great framework for figuring this out and defining it in a very visible and transparent way is something called the RACI model. It's a great model that I see some of the top event planners that we work with use.

RACI stands for responsible, accountable, consulted and informed.

❤️  Special thanks to our Tech lead, Guillermo de la Puente, for his hard work on this project.